


only cute until...

by waldorph



Series: 2012-2013 Winter Anthology [7]
Category: The Avengers (2012)
Genre: Age Regression/De-Aging, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-18
Updated: 2013-01-18
Packaged: 2017-11-26 07:21:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,314
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/648020
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/waldorph/pseuds/waldorph
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Avengers have been de-aged. Phil's not really sure how this is his life.</p>
            </blockquote>





	only cute until...

**Author's Note:**

> written for this prompt: Avengers! gen preferred; the movie-'verse team is turned into kids by some villain, and Coulson is stuck babysitting -melayneseahawk  
> It's a lovely prompt! Should probably have been lolarious and fun and romp-y. But, uh, this is not that lovely happy fic. Sorry dude.

He thinks it should be funny, in some way. Seeing Tony Stark as a toddler flailing his plastic wrench in Bruce Banner's scrunched-up face--it should be funny.

And it kind of is, to see the way Clint keeps trying to climb up onto chairs with some natural affinity for high places, and watching Natasha not-quite-on-accident bump into whatever Clint is climbing up.

Okay, fine. It's hilarious, and they're going to laugh themselves sick at the holiday party watching the tapes. 

And then it's less funny, because no one can figure out how to alter it. No one even knows what really happened, only that Thor, before shrinking into a belligerent five-year-old, crushed the sorcerer's brains in with mjolnir. 

So it's a mess, and not anything that any of Phil or Fury's contacts can mitigate. The people they would turn to--Stark, Thor--are currently about 13 months and five years old, and don't seem to remember who they were. And no one wants to say the one name they're all thinking until Darcy Lewis puts her head on her arms, leaning over the table, and mumbles, "Well, there's always Loki." 

Which, Phil reflects, was always going to make everyone lose their shit.

*

Loki is escorted back by the four warriors who came down in Arizona, with Lady Sif doing most of the talking. It's her hand on Loki's elbow, and Phil makes sure his face is blank while he debriefs them.

"Dastardly wretches," Fandral mutters. "If Thor had not felled him, I swear I would--"

"Yes, well, Thor did, and now no one can turn them back," Loki says silkily, and Fandral glares at him resentfully. "I will need to see them," Loki says over his shoulder, and Coulson doesn't flinch, but he doesn't _like_ it. 

But he has to believe that four Asgardian warriors will have some impact on Loki--and really, what's he going to do? They've already lost the Avengers.

Thor is four, and the oldest of all of them, which makes sense since he's thousands of years old. He's playing blocks with Natasha, but he takes one look at Loki and is _flinging_ himself across the room, taking Loki down at the knees and bursting into sobs. 

"Well," Sif murmurs, stepping back like she's afraid that behavior is in some way catching, "that's familiar." 

"At least there is the excuse of age," Volstagg says, scratching the back of his neck uncomfortably. "This time."

Loki has scooped Thor up easily, and Thor is glaring down at all the other Avengers who are watching with interest. 

Clint looks at Phil and lifts his hands up, and Phil wants to shoot himself in the face.

"If there is a cure," Hogan tells Phil quietly, watching Loki carefully, "Loki will find it." 

It's not really that reassuring.

*

They let Loki and the warriors take Thor, because...because they have Tony Stark trying to stick his fingers in electrical sockets and Bruce Banner blowing up to the size of a body-builder, the Hulk even more irrational now that Banner is effectively two years old. And, yeah, okay, it's fucking hilarious to watch Stark throw plastic balls at the Hulk while the Hulk throws the mother of all temper-tantrums, but Natasha hasn't stopped crying yet, and Clint is sad and small in a corner.

They've had psychiatrists and...well. They've had everyone in. And so far, no one thinks the Avengers remember what they are, or who they are. This is, for all intents and purposes, a group of toddlers, not the de-aged Avengers.

Fuck Phil's fucking life.

*

"I've been through all of his notes," Pepper says, and she looks tired and grief-stricken, and Phil wonders how many times Pepper Potts is going to have to mourn Tony Stark. "There's nothing. JARVIS can't find anything that even indicates he was playing with the idea of something that could...turn full-grown adults into babies." 

No, of course not. Because for all of his bluster and genius and insanity, Tony Stark isn't actively looking for ways to make people miserable.

Still, Phil would have liked to find out he was prepared for it. They kind of need a Tony Stark-engineered miracle, right now.

*

No government has heard of anything, and if Putin knows something, he's not saying a fucking word. 

Phil wants to know why the Cold War ended for everyone except SHIELD. 

He goes to the playroom and reads to Natasha for a little while, because she likes it, sits in his lap and turns the pages herself and sometimes, when the story is familiar, reads it to him. Steve Rogers sits at his knee and listens, small and sweet, and Phil aches for them both.

*

He goes to see Dr. Foster. He lays it all out in front of her, and she frowns and hums to herself and says she'll look into it, but she's not a biologist, or a chemist, and this is a little out of her area. 

He nods, because he knows all of this, and then takes a panicked call from the agent assigned to watching the Avengers. Apparently they've lost Clint. 

He's found by the time Phil bursts into the room, sullen and sobbing, and it's a stark realization that this can't hold. 

These are children, and it's been a month, and they're going to have to make some kind of accomodations. 

Fury isn't happy to hear it, but Phil's never really been in the business of keeping Nick Fury happy. Maria Hill's on his side, jaw clenched as she watches the kids fight more and more often.

*

Loki comes back in the fifth week. They're still drawing up contingency plans, and it's another one of those meetings where they all have nothing to do but worry around a table. 

When the door opens on two over-sized Asgardian gods, Phil is so fucking relieved he could cry. Because there's Thor, who's himself, grown tall and broad and _adult_. 

"Do not look so happy," Thor warns cautions them all. "It will not be so easily done for the others." 

Loki seems almost apologetic to be giving Phil the news, which is that essentially the spell (and it is magic, which, of course it is) had only a tenuous hold on Thor because he's Aesir, not human, and so it was easier to break. 

And even if Loki could figure out how to break it for a human, Rogers has been chemically altered, Banner has a severe case of gamma radiation poisoning, and Stark has an arc reactor in his chest.

"Do you have a time-frame?" Maria Hill asks, and Loki looks away from Thor, who's playing with Clint in the nursery.

"No," he says. "It can be done, though." 

And just when they're feeling reassured, he adds, "Of course, by the time it is ready, they may not want to return, and you may have no need of them."

*

Fury doesn't like Loki's answer, so they bring in experts in magic, a few X-Men, a few people Phil's pretty sure keep doves in their pockets. 

Their answers are all worse: can't be done. Whatever, whoever, did this, tailored it perfectly. It's intricate and even if they did nothing else for the rest of their lives, most people are sure they couldn't do it. One or two think they might be able to undo a couple of them.

"You realize that Thor and Loki don't perceive time the way we do," Dr. Foster points out when she's read into the situation. "They've lived thousands of years. Thor once told me he stole his brother's favorite book and Loki didn't speak to him for ten years, and he meant it the way I would mean it if I said Darcy didn't talk to me for a day." 

Phil closes his eyes and pinches the bridge of his nose. He hadn't really wanted to think that through.

"Well, shit," Fury mutters. "So we put the Avengers in the foster system?"

That just seems like a terrible idea. It's also becoming really obvious that they don't have much of a choice.

*

Tony's the first one to get adopted and given a new identity. It's not really surprising, because he had friends, a staff, people who care about him. Pepper isn't ready to be the mother of the man she was going to marry as a toddler, and Phil can't blame her at all. So Tony Stark becomes Nate Rhodes, son of Col. Jim Rhodes.

Banner's cousin, Anna Drake, and her husband, Harry Savio, come forward when contacted. Anna teaches Literature at Columbia and Joe is an artist of moderate notoriety in the New York art scene, and they look shell-shocked and very normal, but when they go into the nursery Bruce lets Anna pick him up, and Natasha hands Harry _Love You Forever_ , and by the third day Harry is in Phil's office, asking about fostering her, too. 

"It's important for kids to have siblings," he says, and then, "it'll probably be good for Bruce, to grow up with someone and fight with them. It'll probably be the best thing for him." 

And they check out, and Hill signs off on it because Fury is somewhere drinking away all of this bullshit. Natasha Romanov becomes Amelia Drake-Savio and Bruce Banner becomes Ian Drake-Savio, and Phil tries not to feel nauseous because suddenly this all feels more permanent.

*

Steve Rogers and Clint Barton are a little bit more of a struggle. Phil will admit that he has a moment where he thinks about how cool it would be, to raise Captain America. Then he actually thinks about it and realizes that no, that's a fucking terrible idea. If they're going to be rehoming these kids, they're going to put them with stable families, with parents who aren't at risk of being stabbed by idiot aliens. 

*

They interview eighteen sets of parents for Steve Rogers, which seems absurd because he's a sweet, adorable three-year-old. In the end, Ester and Nicole Rinkema are the best candidates, and bring their nine-month-old to meet him. Ester works for the CIA but she's on SHIELD's payroll as a data analyst, and Nicole is a lawyer at a big firm in Boston. Steve attaches to Cora, the baby, like he's velcro or something, and at that point they're all so glad to see a smile on his face that they let them adopt him with their blessing. Whatever reservations they have about putting him in a family with another kid when he could at any moment grow into a fully-grown man pale in the face of that smile.

*

Clint ends up going to two retired SHIELD operatives who now freelance and work as consultants around the world. He babbles at them in English and French immediately, and Phil is so relieved that Clint isn't _hiding_ from them that he gives his blessing, and Neal and Adam Parker take their son, Jack, to their house in Paris.

*

"So now what?" Maria asks, and Phil exhales slowly. 

"We carry on. I mean, we only had them for five months, it's been only about two years since the whole I Am Iron Man Fiasco. We carry on." 

"Motherfucker," Fury mutters, and they all drink to that.

*

The Avengers grow up. Phil keeps idle tabs on all of them, watching them grow up into pre-schoolers and then preadolescents and then into 14-year-olds, and it's weird to remember that these kids were the Avengers, because it's been twelve years and change, and SHIELD has protected Earth just fine without them.

Well, SHIELD and the X-Men, but Phil doesn't want to talk about those assholes. 

So it's kind of a surprise when Loki shows up at SHIELD HQ, and Phil feels a little sick to his stomach, actually. 

They give them all a choice. 

*

Steve sits at the table and listens as his mothers explain everything, and then shakes his head quietly, smiling at Phil and Loki as he politely but firmly turns them down. He shakes Phil's hand and says that he hopes Phil doesn't take it personally, but he'd never like to see him again.

*

Clint doesn't want to even hear about it, they walk in the door and he shouts for his dads and then runs down the street. 

"He does that," Neal says.

"It means no," Adam supplies helpfully. Phil sighs.

*

Tony Stark is going to MIT next year, and when he sits down with Phil, Rhodes a careful distance away with his hand wrapped around Pepper's, Phil honestly thinks that this is going to be the one person who will want their life back. 

Loki explains the process, and Tony listens, and then shrugs and says, "Nah, but thanks, bro." 

Phil thinks that maybe it's that Nate Rhodes is happier than Tony Stark ever was, and is smart enough to recognize it.

*

Phil will admit he's nervous about asking Bruce and Natasha--not Natasha, but Bruce.

It turns out he was worried about the wrong one. She gets quiet and furious, spots of color on her cheeks as she pulls out of Bruce's restraining grip, demanding to know why she should even consider dying so that they can get an assassin back

And it's weird, Phil never thought of it like that--he guesses he thought of the kids as place-holders, not real. But he watches Loki's smirk, like Loki understands her, and the relief on Nata--no. On Mia's face when she sees it, and then slams into her room. 

"And that," Loki says, "concludes my business here." 

So it's on Phil to return to SHIELD without a single Avenger--Thor hasn't come back yet, and Loki coming back by himself wasn't subtle. 

Still, maybe, in a decade or so, some of them will find their way back to SHIELD. 

Phil kind of hopes not, actually. He'd like to retire in peace.

**Author's Note:**

>  **Blanket Permission:** go ahead and translate, make podfic, rework the fic, or do whatever other transformative work you can think of. If the work is hosted on another site, drop me a comment or email and I'll put a link in the story notes!
> 
> [twitter:](https://twitter.com/waldorph) for unfiltered me || [tumblr:](http://waldorph.tumblr.com/) less about me, more about the pretty gifsets and art

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[Podfic] only cute until...](https://archiveofourown.org/works/2105757) by [sisi_rambles](https://archiveofourown.org/users/sisi_rambles/pseuds/sisi_rambles)




End file.
